atashi
by rhymeless
Summary: fic snippits. idea stolen from pink. don't lynch me! (contains yaoi, yuri, het, etc)
1. Me and the Other Me

I see her in my dreams tonight. She is the same person I see when I look in the mirror. She has my hair, and my face, and even my body. Yet unlike the girl in the mirror she moves, and reaches out to touch my cheek. 

Her voice is low, like silk, and almost like a purr. But underneath I can almost hear something, something that is familiar to me. Something that _is_ me. "Who are you?" she asks. The question is straight-forward enough. People ask it every day. How long have I been searching for the answer to that question? 

The name they have given me is Gyro. 

"But who is 'Gyro'?" 

I don't know. 

"I see." And unlike the others I have met, she does see. 

Why are you wearing my face? 

For a moment I think she has no answer to this question, for her face is curious and almost surprised. "I see you have forgotten, child of mine," she says. 

I do not know you. 

"I shouldn't expect so, if you don't even know who you are," she says. "No, look at me... I am you, and you are me. We are one, and many." I do not understand. She does not look angry like so many others have; she looks merely amused. "You are the child of my soul. A simulacrum--a copy of me. I suppose it was fair foolish of me to leave you for so long--now you have come into your own being. Well, I will have no child of mine's blood on my hands. So I must teach you." 

What is there to learn? 

She smiles. Her eyes are blue, like mine. "There is much for you to learn," she says. "Who is this man?" 

The name he has told me is Flash Man. 

Her tone still one of loving patience, she asks, "And who is Flash Man?" 

He is... 

"What is he?" 

He is... 

"Who is he?" 

...I don't know. 

"Do you love him?" she asks. 

I do. 

"Does he love you?" 

He does. 

She smiles at me. "There have been others," she says. "There have been those who say they love you, or pretend to love you, or they love your body. How do you tell them apart?" 

I have no answer for this. But I know... I know he is the person for me. The person I want to love more than anyone. 

"And what if he doesn't love you?" she asks. 

I don't know. 

"We must decide what must be done," she says. 

Decide... I don't know what to do. I don't know anything that I used to. Yet I can remember things... but they're so far away. I can't reach them. How can I decide? 

Her smile is sad, and her voice, when she speaks, is my voice. "If he doesn't love you for who you are, you must leave him. You must find someone just for you." 

And how will I know if he loves me just for me? 

"You will know." 

How do I know who is me? 

"You will know... child of mine." 

And then she is gone, and I am alone. So I think, and I remember. 

I remember awakening to see the face of the Man Who Made Me. I remember seeing the Man Who Touched Me, the one who has the look of a flower. I remember being touched, being used... I remember being saved by the Man With Hair of Blood, and the Lightning-Man. Yet I do not remember their names. 

I remember flower petals, a smell of jasmine, green hair and big blue eyes and little hands with long fingers. Long, thin fingers--artist's fingers, says the Unicorn-Boy. I remember sadness, then love, then regret... I remember Flash Man. 

Then this is who I am. 

_atashi._


	2. Unicorn

"Why are you here, my grandchild? You are a creature of human buildings and companions. Why are you in this white building?"  
"Because I'm crazy," Ring said, flatly, his face blank and his eyes staring at nothing. "I dream things and then they come true. I see things that no one else sees."  
The blue-eyed man frowned. "But those are signs of prophecies, of an future-seeing..."  
Magnet stared at him, blankly. "A whosawhatist?"  
The corners of the white man's eyes crinkled in amusement. "Few of the People have it, but all of our halfling brethren have always been oracles. But never has one developed this power so soon..."  
"That boy is much more intelligent than he lets on." No one had heard Metal come in, but no one was surprised, either--he was a doctor, after all, so he could have gotten in easily. "He plays the innocent because he knows it comforts other people to see someone stupider than them. He's able to harness his power so effectively I can barely even see his aura."  
The blue-eyed man instantly recognized who Metal was--although it would be hard to say if it was from the prominent, twining black spirals on his neck and face--the mark of the gods--or from intuition. "Healer," he said, respect in his voice and manner. More than he'd had for Magnet, anyway. "You show an impressive amount of knowledge of our lore."  
Metal inclined his head briefly. "My Lord has had me doing research on unicorns and unicorn mages for the past few weeks. Only now I realize that it's not some passing fancy of his--he /knows/."  
"Knows what?" Magnet growled again, wishing someone would start making sense.  
"Knows what Ring is, who he is, and exactly what he wants to do with him. No, don't scowl at me like that, it's not anything perverted." Magnet /was/ scowling. "My Lord doesn't care what we do, but he's by no means kind. He listens to me only because I save him millions in damage repair."  
"No mere human could control one of our kind," the blue-eyed man scoffed.  
"Perhaps not by force." Metal's voice was light, contemplative. "But what if he had some sort of advantage over him? Say, something that meant the world to him?"  
Magnet felt light-headed. "No," he said. "Never Ring..." 


	3. of unbeing

"By all the laws of being each individual born of another belongs only to themselves," Metal explained, keeping his voice low. "This doesn't apply to non-Gifted robots, of course, as the magic in birthing is what gives us our individuality. So that's why robots can be controlled by their creators. Humunculus, simulacrum, and non-gifted unbeings are bound to their creators and can--must--be controlled by them."  
"I don't get it. If they need to be controlled, then why--"  
Metal scowled. "Let me finish. If an unbeing is left to its own for awhile, even the gods couldn't stop it from developing a soul. And as everyone knows, things with souls can't be controlled by another thing with a soul."  
Quick blinked in surprise. "So, if they're left alone for long enough, they become real things?"  
"Yes. They turn from unbeing into being. That's why most sane mages destroy their creations before then."  
"That's not fair," Quick said, anger in his clear blue eyes. "Just because they're not slaves anymore they should be killed?"  
"Of course it's not fair," Metal replied evenly. "If life were fair, it wouldn't be so hard." 


	4. dead man's reverie

system error  
  
Metal frowned, staring at the screen in front of him. He had one foot on the ground and the other on the seat of his chair, one arm tossed behind the backrest carelessly. System error... that was impossible. This was just routine maintenence.  
  
He pulled himself forward, his freckle-spotted nose inches from the screen. System error. Error in what system? He scowled and ran a query, waiting for the results. The computer whirred in protest, already overworked and using every bit of its RAM. He sighed and turned off his MP4 player. As much as he hated working in silence, except for the swift clacking of the keyboard and softer whirring noises of the computer, he really shouldn't be running maintenence while having open his MP4 player and downloading software and three Internet windows. He made a face. Microsoft, go figure. Wily really was evil.  
  
Scowling, he closed three popup porno ads, the original browser windows, and exited the downloading software. Well, he could live without it. Certainly he spent more hours away from the computer than on it, but once he did get on, Elec had to pry him away from it. He liked the anonymous atmosphere of the Internet--there, no one knew he was one of Wily's feared Robot Masters. There, he was judged only by the power of his mind and the words he typed. If he got too stressed from the constant bickering--flaming, it was called--he could just shut the computer down and voila, all his troubles were over.  
  
//If only real life were that simple,// he thought, sitting cross-legged (although he wasn't supposed to) on the computer chair. The query was still running. Elec was convinced he was crazy, with all his crazy Internet friends and the unique ways he had of draping himself across the chair. Not to mention the stories. Metal smiled; writing was the one way he had of releasing his thoughts unto the rest of the world, the poor things. He was mildly disturbed by the abundance of "slash" fanfiction about Mega Man, although he really shouldn't have been surprised. He was attractive, as was Forte (who was frequently, if not constantly, the dominant member of the 'relationship'), so of course girls would be pairing them together quicker than you could snap your fingers and say "what the hell."  
  
Not that he wasn't adverse to the idea of "slash" writing. In fact, he liked it. He'd never admit it to anyone, but he had a huge crush on Elec, one that made him feel giddy and his knees feel weak whenever he got around him. It was utterly silly and quite frightening--Elec, after all, was his "brother", and as he'd asserted many times after Magnet's advances, very straight.  
  
He made a face. He'd just finished running a system check on Elec, and he'd turned out fine. So now it was his turn. And what was this stupid system error? He didn't feel anything odd... 


	5. NOISE

Ring stared out the window, resting his chin on his knees, his arms lightly wrapped around himself. The rain was depressing him; he was an active, friendly boy, and having to stay inside upset him. But Pharaoh would be more upset if he went outside in the rain and caught a cold. Which was ridiculous, because as a robot he could inot/i catch a cold, and in fact the water would probably be good for him, because it was getting sort of hot in here. Pharaoh hated the cold--he was designed to work in extreme heat so Cossack had not given him any tolerance for cold--and had probably jacked the heater all the way up...  
  
Although staying inside was depressing, he had to admit it was pretty outside, as the snow began to melt under heavy rain. The window was awash in tiny beads of water that ran and criss-crossed and glimmered in what little light there was. It was afternoon, which meant there was enough light to see, but not enough to be anything resembling cheerful.  
  
He sighed and leaned against the window frame. This was his favorite spot even when it was sunny. Sometimes he'd run and hide when Pharaoh wanted to give him piano lessons--he didn't know why, because he was terrible at piano, for all that he was a robot and ishould/i be able to do most anything with relative ease--and just sit here, watching the outside. He stayed here more often in the winter, because in any other season he could find a decent hiding spot outside. Russian winters, however, were far too cold to chance leaving without snow gear, and all that bulk would make him more obvious than a hippo in Siberia.  
  
Besides, he didn't think there was any gear in his size. As the "youngest" of Cossack's eight robots, he was also the smallest, barely even five feet tall. He was slender and very light--Cossack made him too thin, even for a speed-based robot--and out of armor, humans often mistook him for a very young boy; a late preteen or early teenager. He had fair skin lightly dotted with freckles, short brown hair with two long braids in the front, and big, green-brown, Bambi-like eyes.  
  
By contrast, his older "brother", Pharaoh, was huge. Designed to be a leader and physically powerful, he was over six feet in height and broad-shouldered, heavily "muscled" and had large hands with short, calloused fingers that made anything delicate like computer work difficult. He had shoulder-length black hair that he kept neatly brushed and tied out of his hair, black eyes, and skin that was a nice shade of golden-brown. He fit right in in Egypt, but here in Russia amongst so many tiny pale people he stuck out like an excrutiatingly sore thumb.  
  
As far as they both were concerned, Pharaoh was the brain iand/i brawns of the two of them, and Ring was his little monkey boy, going into places Pharaoh couldn't reach--such as air ducts and bathroom stalls--and doing things with his tiny hands Pharaoh couldn't. Ring had much smaller hands with, in proportion, longer fingers and was more suited to writing or computer work, even if he wasn't very bright.  
  
Actually, Ring was a lot smarter than anyone gave him credit for. He just lacked common sense, and put up against six other robots who liked to torture him, that was a bad thing.  
  
He fiddled with his braids, looking at his feet. Everything about him was tiny--tiny hands, tiny feet (although he lacked toes; Cossack saw no point in them and so made his robots without any) and, well, he was just short. He'd tried taking one of those forumlas they advertised on TV, that were supposed to increase your size... But they hadn't worked, and Pharaoh yelled at him when he found out. He still didn't know what the big deal was.  
  
He sighed and kicked off the thin, holey slippers he wore, staring at his tiny little toes. Why couldn't he have been built a little bit bigger? Just a teensy bit? He was tired of being half the size of the other seven robots. Even Bright was taller than him--Ring was exactly four-ten while Bright was five-one.  
  
Cossack hadn't exactly been entirely sure what he'd wanted with Ring. First he'd wanted an air-based robot, Bird Man or Angel Man or something. Then he'd decided he didn't, and that he wanted another long-ranged fighter, except that he'd forgotten to tell the construction droids that and they'd already completed the base body--the skeleton and wiring that would transfer information to his extremeties, the plastic outer casing and then the synthetic skin to cover the seams. By the time Cossack remembered that he'd already told the droids to begin, Ring had been complete, wings and all. He did, however, remember in time to stop them from getting very far on the armor, and he switched the plans.  
  
Cossack was a genius, but scatter-brained like that. It would have been far too costly even to disassemble Ring and rebuild him, so he tested him out with the new armor. Unfortunately, he'd forgotten to make adjustments to incorporate Ring's old design with the new one. The new armor weighed him down too much for flight, and also slowed him down considerably.  
  
It was embarrassing, to say the least. He was a total failure--he knew it, Cossack knew it, everyone knew it. So Cossack had been working on a way to wheedle out a new grant for a new robot to replace him...  
  
Well, that was okay. Cossack wouldn't take Ring apart as long as he was useful, and he iwas/i useful--as something to show off. Although small he was polite and very sweet, the ideal servant to have when Cossack invited guests over. 


	6. in the rain rewrite

He lay in the streets, crumpled, tiny, and very wet. He made quite a pathetic sight--at least, if you'd seen him in his prime. Millions of people died like this every day, but they were human nobodies, not heroes. Heroes died heroically, not lying in the gutter like street trash.  
  
It was difficult to say how Rock would meet his end, although he'd always pictured either dying at the hands of Wily's robots or simply of old age.  
  
Never had he imagined that he might go like this.  
  
And so he cried. He cried for the family that would miss him, and he cried for the people who wouldn't. He cried because he would miss everything--birds in the trees, the sun shining on gently waving grass, the laughter of children. Maybe he'd even miss the fighting; at the moment, he couldn't remember what fighting was, nor why he had hated it so much...  
  
He couldn't remember anything, and he cried because he wanted to so badly. All he knew now--cold, wet streets--the smell of wet concrete--the click of shoe on ground--umbrellas opening--cars honking... He did not want to remember only this.  
  
He had no idea what he'd done wrong that had made them angry enough to hurt him like this. Did he want to remember? Possibly not. Even humans could kill a robot, provided the robot did not fight back. And he hadn't, because he loved them.  
  
"It's not fair..." His whisper, scratchy and choked, seemed detached from him. No one heard it but himself, but he liked to think the words had been heard.  
  
Then the rain fell. It was soft at first, but quickly turned into a deafening roar. Although it wet him to the core, it washed the circulatory fluid off him; and he was grateful, because in the rain no one can see you crying. They mustn't think he were a sissy, after all.  
  
He wanted to hate them. He'd fought for them, shed blood for them, died for them, and this was how they had repaid him! He wanted to scream and shout and throw a tantrum, and refuse to help them, and let Wily kill them all... But he couldn't.  
  
So there he lay in the rain, the hero of the Robot Wars, who loved the people who killed him. 


	7. iris

Zero squinted at the small girl sitting a few feet away from him, resisting the urge to flip the hair out of his eyes or squirm into a more comfortable position. As it was Iris frowned at him and shook her head.  
  
"No, please don't move yet," she said, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth in concentration. "I'm not quite done."  
  
"How... much... longer?" The phrase was spoken slowly because he was trying not to move his lips too much.  
  
"Just a little bit more..." There was a pause as she dabbled something on the canvas before her. "There. Finished." He jumped up in half a second and stretched, feeling imaginary kinks work out of his back--why did reploids even bother? he wondered--and half hopped next to her to examine her work.  
  
"Damn, you're good," he said, scratching the back of his head. The likeness was beyond perfect into the realm of exaggeration. "Too good. I think you took about five years off my face."  
  
She smiled. "An artist's duty is to portray the truth of what people want to see, not what they actually look like. In this case, it was a lot of work." He pinched her nose and she laughed.  
  
He watched her as she gathered up her materials and cleaned her brushes off. He loved Iris, that was for sure. He'd loved other women, as well, but this was the shy, clumsy love of a young man, not the smooth seduction he gave other women. Iris merited more than a quick tumble, anyway--unlike other women she didn't love him for his position or power, but for him. Things like title and rank meant nothing to Iris. She treated everyone, young and old, like an erring nephew--all except Zero, her lover.  
  
He'd given everything for her, dropped everything and flung himself at her whole-heartedly. He treated her with a mix of comraderie and loving, which she enjoyed, and they were as close as any man and woman could get to one another. She was sweet, a charming naivete that was quite his opposite--his most common nickname was the red devil, and if he were a devil, she must be something else. Not an angel--she was fallable, almost human. But she was as close to heaven as he'd ever get.  
  
She smiled at him through her bangs, brushing hair out of her eyes.  
  
"I'm not joking, though," he said, suddenly. "You really are good. I don't know why you never show anybody these paintings. You could make a lot of money."  
  
She gave him a small smile--the one that drove him crazy, because in her face there was something he couldn't see, some deep-rooted secret about her that he could never quite catch.  
  
"Why?" he asked. "You're a good artist, a good singer, good with plants and brats. So why don't you let anyone know?"  
  
"Because," she said simply, "I don't think that they'd understand." 


	8. To the moon and bacK

Sometimes I can still see her walking down the halls, her hair following her ever so gingerly, her heels clicking meekly against the floor. Her presence was one that could not be ignored no matter how hard one tried, and I had tried time and time again. Exasperating, persistant, downright stubborn...  
  
And sometimes I can still feel her cold body held against me as I grasp at her, trying to put the life I'd taken away back inside of her.  
  
Suddenly that presence--demanding, attentive, so /there/--was so small, so tiny. I could have crushed it if I wanted to, and I had to crush it although I didn't...  
  
She was never so beautiful as she was then, with the blood pouring down her thin frame and tattered dress, remnants of her earthly presence. Something is whispering at me; I can feel it begin to take control even as I deny its presence. Madness does not ask to be let in, for he opens the door and enters himself; I leave my body and mind to him, because surely he knows better than I do.  
  
I raise her head and she looks at me with dull, lifeless eyes, glazed with death, and for a moment I'm not sorry. But then the feeling goes away and the realization of what I had done sinks in.  
  
Roll, my Roll--who would have believed you would ever die? Yours was a being that should have lived forever, could have lived forever if I had not interfered.  
  
My face and claws are splattered in her blood, and more covers them as I run one claw down her broken face to her broken body. We would have been joined together in life, but now we can be joined together in death. At least there, no one can hurt you.  
  
What a pleasant dream! 


End file.
